A crowd of people gathered in the Lansing Center Tuesday morning to participate in Ingham County’s tax auction.

Listen

Listening...

/

0:59

The goal of the auction is to address blight and bring tax-foreclosed homes back on the tax roll and into productive use.

Ingham County Treasurer Eric Schertzing says that since the Great Recession in 2007, the incidence of tax foreclosure has doubled and is still elevated. But in recent years, things have been slowly improving.

“The most interesting thing happened 3 or 4 years ago when the quality of the auction investors, the auction buyers, really seemed to change, the economic spigots of access to money and capital improved so we started to see higher prices for the properties,” he says.

About 200 properties were involved in Tuesday’s auction. Three of them are historical covenant homes that must be rehabilitated in accordance with governmental standards to maintain their historic integrity.

Houses that didn’t sell will be on the list for the second auction of the year on August 29th.

Related Content

The Lansing Housing Commission has been under new leadership since late February. Martell Armstrong was hired as executive director, leaving a similar post in Inkster, Michigan. He also has management experience from previous jobs with housing authorities in Texas and Ohio.

Amy Haimerl and her husband wanted to move from Brooklyn to Detroit, so they bought an old house at a rock-bottom price. The fixer-upper has become the subject of her book “Detroit Hustle”. Current State's Scott Pohl went to see the house for himself and talk with the author.